In an instant, my dream date is shattered.
Pitching Hay Bales
“Use your arms and legs, not your back.”
I pick up another bale from the rack and haul it to the conveyer belt that carries it to the loft. I’m lucky to be able to move at all. I don’t want to look like a wimp, but hauling fifty-pound bales of hay while sweat pours down my face for two hours straight is the hardest physical labor I’ve ever done. I have stalks in my hair, down my shirt and sock, and inside my work gloves, even in my pants. I itch all over. My arms no longer feel connected to my body.
I stop to rest at the end of the rack and take a swig of Gatorade. I’m not sure I’m going to make it.
“We’re lucky Dad decided to make small bales,” Brad says as he watches me. “They’re usually seventy-five to one hundred pounds.”
I drag myself over to him. “If you’re saying that to make me feel better, then you suck.”
Brad laughs. He has the same laugh as his dad, who picked us up after school in a dusty black pickup. They both sound like the color gray.
“I should mention that I’ve never worked on a farm before,” I told his dad as his weathered hand grasped mine in a firm handshake.
“Lifting bales of hay isn’t rocket science. But you’re in for a good time,” he joked with a hearty laugh. “Nothing builds muscle like farm work.”
“If he survives,” Brad said, and they both laughed.
When we pulled out of the school parking lot and drove past the football field, Brad turned his head to look at the empty field, a wistful expression on his face. I didn’t ask him about it, but it’s been on my mind since then.
“Is this what you do every day after school?” I ask.
“This time of year, yeah. It’s not that bad. We all pitch in.” Brad’s older brother Karl is in the loft above us, moving bales off the conveyer belt. His dad mowed and raked the field a few days ago. He later drove across that same field with a tractor that pulled a baler, a machine that gathers the mowed hay and squirts it out in rectangular bundles. Brad’s mom drove a truck pulling a flatbed rack from the field to the barn. It’s stacked high with the hay bales. I can see his dad still out in the field past the grazing dairy cows, baling more hay, trying to make the most of the warm afternoon sun.
“What about sports?” I ask Brad.
“What about them?”
“I’d guess the football coach would love to have you on the roster.”
“ ’Course he would. I played when I was younger. Been too busy the last few years, though. I might play again when I feel like it.”
I’m not sure why he doesn’t feel like it now. He’d be a sure starter on the varsity team. But he turns away and I get the feeling I shouldn’t press him.
We unload one rack as his mom pulls up with another one. I cringe at the piles of bales. Counting them would only depress me right now.
“There are snacks inside when you need a break,” she says to me. “Don’t overdo it this first day.”
What I really want is to go home. Mom won’t be picking me up for another hour and a half. And the bales aren’t going anywhere, so Brad and I take a bathroom break. We walk through an old porch with cracked plaster and worn tile that looks a hundred years old, but it leads to a remodeled kitchen and living room that look eighty years newer.
“My grandpa grew up in this house,” Brad says. “This farm has been in our family for over a hundred years.”
We sit at the kitchen counter and eat homemade apple strudel. The soft apple and cinnamon mixture is still warm and I inhale three pieces.
Brad pours us glasses of milk. “My mom makes the best strudel.”
I agree, even though it’s the first time I’ve ever eaten it.
“So, you coming back after today?” he asks between bites.
“If my arms don’t fall off.”
He nods. “Good. I wasn’t sure. I mean, you’ve got that California tan. I thought you might be trying out for the tennis team or something.”
“I don’t play tennis.”
“Yeah, well, you seem the type.”
“Do I seem the type to lift hay bales?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then why’d you ask me to help?”
My question catches him off guard. He sputters out an answer. “I thought you might like some extra cash, and having help would make the job go faster.”
“So you’d have more time for something else?”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Football?”
Brad tips his Vikings cap. “How’d you know?”
“You don’t seem the tennis type, either.”
Brad smirks. “Okay, you’re right. I really want to be on the team, but Dad needs me here. I thought that if we got ahead a bit, he might let me take some time off to play.” He sighs. “Don’t see that happening, though. What’s your sport?”
“Well, I joined the Environmental Club.”
He nods. “Yeah, you seem that type, too.”
“I’m not, though. Not really,” I confess. “I only joined to hang out with Halle Phillips.”
“That’s as good a reason as any, I guess. You know, before you go off on the environmental practices of our farm, I have to tell you that we do as much sustainable farming as we can. We use minimum pesticides and we don’t fill our animals with a bunch of hormones. But we can’t go organic and make a living here. Dad’s barely scraping by as it is.” He shakes his head. “You know how many farms are going under in this area? If we disappear, all that will be left are the big industrialized farms. So go tell your environmental club that.” His voice is tight.
“I wasn’t going to say anything about your farm,” I respond. “Our club is protesting the taconite plant in town because of the number of people who’ve died from mesothelioma.”
“I hate to tell you this, Baxter, but if the taconite plant closed down, there wouldn’t be a town.”
“That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t ensure the safety of the people who work there. All we’re asking for is a study on the effects of the taconite dust on the workers.”
Brad puts our plates in the dishwasher. “You sound awfully committed for someone who only joined to impress a girl.”
He’s right. I’m beginning to sound just like Halle and Eddie and the rest of them. Maybe I should take up tennis.
Brad pats me on the back as we return to work. “You’re not that type, huh?”
The Plan and Halle’s Ex
The next meeting of the Environmental Club is held in room 201 at 2:36 p.m., exactly one week after the protest. The five of us sit in a circle on top of the desks, passing around a bag of Fritos.
I hope we’re going to discuss world hunger or global warming or something remote to northern Minnesota. I’m even thinking of bringing up the dragonflies if it will keep us away from the taconite plant.
But Halle is a broken record. She won’t give up. “We need higher clean air standards in the plant. I mean, no one knows what level of exposure to taconite fibers is safe.”
Eddie nods. “What we really need is a strategy. A way to make people sit up and notice the problem.”
“It’s more than that,” Roxie adds. “We want action. My aunt is a nurse and she said that she’s seeing more cases of mesothelioma every year.”
Gina hugs Eddie’s arm. “I’ve got it. Let’s call Oprah.” Today she has a purple streak down the middle of her short, dark hair. It’s a good match for her landing-strip voice.
“Get real,” Eddie says, pushing his long hair behind his ears. “Oprah isn’t interested in the Iron Range.”
He has on the shirt with the big red-and-black turtle on the front. This time I read the back of it, which says, “Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.” All this time I’d thought Eddie was just into turtles.
“Gina has a point,” Halle says. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a celebrity get behind us? Someone big?”
“
Oprah’s big,” Gina insists.
“We’re not calling Oprah,” Eddie says. “If we’re going to get a celebrity, I’d rather go with someone hot. Someone with big breasts.” He holds out his hands.
Gina slugs his arm. “Don’t talk about women that way.” But she looks down at her own shirt as she talks, as though checking to see how she measures up.
“What chance do we have to get someone like that anyway?” Roxie asks in a whispery voice. “Who’s going to support the Madison High Mental Club going up against a big company like Wellington Mines?”
Gina opens her mouth, probably to say something about Oprah, but Eddie sticks a Frito in it. “She’s right,” Eddie said. “Nobody cares about what happens on the Iron Range. We’re at the mercy of the foreign investors.”
“The Department of Health,” I blurt out. I want to contribute, but my throat constricts at the thought of speaking up. I’m always worried I’ll mess up.
“What about it?” Eddie asks.
I look to Halle. She nods her encouragement. “If a study was necessary, it would be done by the Department of Health.”
Eddie shakes his head. “If the Department of Health cared about us, they’d have done a study years ago. You’re on ‘The Range’ now. Blue-collar, beer-drinking, hell-raising miners and loggers who don’t matter shit to the rest of the world except for how much iron we produce. You ever hear of us in California? Did you even know what the Iron Range was before you moved here? No, because we’re in the middle of freakin’ nowhere, USA.”
“Lebanon, Kansas, is the geographic center of the United States,” I correct him.
“What?” He stares at me as though I said I love Oprah.
“Don’t harass the new kid,” Halle warns. “We’re not exactly garnering the support of our fellow students as it is.”
She turns to me and whispers, “Lebanon, Kansas? Who knows that kind of stuff?”
That’s nothing. I could tell her that I learned that piece of information on October 16 two years ago. I could tell her that I had toast with peanut butter and two glasses of milk for breakfast that morning and that a semi collided with a pickup truck and two cars thirty minutes later on the freeway east of our house. I could tell her the names of the three people who were killed.
Shakespeare said that “ignorance is the curse of God.” He would have thought differently if he’d had my memory.
It’s a problem of opening my mouth when I should just leave it closed. When I first met Dr. Anderson, I tried to impress him by memorizing pages of the phone book in his office.
“How do you do that?” Dr. Anderson asked.
“I see them in my mind,” I told him.
“I don’t think you have a photographic memory, but you do have an amazing ability to remember.”
“Why isn’t it photographic?”
“Well, lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but no one really does.”
“I do,” I insisted, as though I’d been presented with a challenge.
So Dr. Anderson did perform one test on me: the random dot stereogram test. He showed my right eye a pattern of ten thousand random dots, and the next day showed my left eye a different dot pattern. I mentally fused the two and saw an image of a three dimensional dinosaur, like one of those magic 3-D pictures that you have to cross your eyes to see. Afterward, Dr. Anderson said I had an authentic photographic memory.
I’d puffed up when Dr. Anderson had told me I was the only person who’d ever passed the test. He said it was a special gift, like having absolute musical pitch.
But someone with absolute pitch would know better than to belt out the lyrics of “Hey Jude” in the middle of the Environmental Club meeting. Why didn’t I have that filter?
“Baxter is right,” Roxie says. I’m surprised that her soft voice holds that kind of strength. “Look at us. We’re a group of five. How much pressure can we put on Wellington Mines? But the Mesothelioma Research Association looks at these problems. They have some kind of environmental competition every year for school clubs like ours to encourage environmental awareness. But the deadline is just a few weeks away. If we could get them interested, maybe they’d put pressure on the Department of Health.”
Halle frowns. “I don’t know what kind of chance we’d have at a competition. But maybe if they think it’s more than just a regional problem they’ll do something. They’re using leftover taconite tailings in road construction now. That affects everyone, not just the people of Wellington.”
“How are we going to get anyone to come up here?” Gina asks. “I mean, without Hollywood or Oprah to help us?”
Eddie holds a finger in the air, silencing us. “That’s it. We go Hollywood. We make a movie. We talk to the families, do a profile of the people who died and the cancer that caused their deaths. You know, our own Michael Moore film.”
Gina grabs his finger. “Who’s gonna talk to us?”
“We can talk to us.” Halle’s feet are shaking as they hang off the desk. “We start with ourselves. We’ve all lost someone to mesothelioma, except for Baxter.” She looks at me and the energy pours off her like sweat. “We can use the video for the competition and you can film it, Baxter. You’ll give the whole film a fresh perspective.”
“Me? But I don’t—”
“We can get the equipment from Kenny in the AV Department,” Eddie says in a rushed voice. “Roxie, you look up the requirements for the competition. And you and Gina check out other families who’ve had relatives die of mesothelioma. Gina, you are my inspiration.”
He kisses her on the neck and she giggles. “Not here, you savage.”
He grumbles into her neck, “I love it when you talk dirty.”
Roxie folds her arms. “What’s this movie rated?”
“We’ll take turns interviewing each other,” Halle says. “We’ll talk about our relatives who have died. Then we’ll make a chart with facts and figures to back it up.”
Halle and Eddie make plans to borrow the equipment and introduce me to the tech guy at school. Gina and Roxie will write out interview questions and do the research.
I walk outside with Halle at 4:07 after the meeting is over. The rest of our group is ahead of us.
“Don’t worry about Eddie,” she says. “He has a lot of rough edges.”
“I don’t think he likes me,” I confess.
“Eddie doesn’t like anyone at first. He says that he picks his friends carefully and his enemies even more carefully.”
I can’t help but wonder which category I’ll end up in.
“No offense, Baxter, but you have a tendency to blurt out random things, so I figure you for more of a behind-the-scenes type of guy. I hope you don’t mind not being in front of the camera.”
“I don’t care about that. But I’ve never made a movie before.”
She takes my arm. Her touch feels natural, like it’s meant to be there. I remember all the times we held hands in kindergarten, how natural it felt then, too. But it feels different now. More purposeful.
“Just think,” she says. “You could become the next Scorsese and you’ll owe it all to me. Then I can say I knew you before you were famous.”
We step outside and a shiver works through me as the cold air fills my sweatshirt.
“How did it get so cold so fast?”
Halle puts her arms out wide. “Welcome to the land of extremes. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” Her voice takes the chill out of the air. It’s captivating and breathless and it reminds me of the line from Gatsby, “that voice was a deathless song.”
Being with Halle is a rush of emotion. Part of me wants to share everything with her, to tell her about kindergarten and Dink and my photographic memory and how she sounds like I imagine the garden of Eden sounded before God kicked out Adam and Eve. The other part wants to forget everything about Dink and my former life and be the guy she thinks I am, the guy she needs me to be.
We’re almost at Eddie’s van when a red and black
motorcycle pulls up in front of us. Halle’s grip on my arm tightens.
“Hi, Halle,” a guy with square shoulders says from behind a black helmet. Then he takes it off and shakes out his blond tresses. It’s Hunter, the ice hockey god. He sees Halle’s hand, or what her hand is grabbing, and he revs the engine not once, but twice, and I have a feeling I’m making another enemy.
“Hey, Hunter. Why aren’t you hitting a hockey puck?” Halle sounds friendly enough, but I’m relieved when I don’t hear the bubbly in her voice.
“We got out early today. You need a ride?”
“No thanks.”
“You still trying to save the world?”
“Just the Iron Range. I’m putting off Asia and Africa till senior year.”
He laughs. “You always crack me up.” Then he nods at me. “You new?”
Halle tugs on my arm. “This is Baxter. He moved here from California and no, he’s not a hockey puck addict like you. At least, I don’t think so. Are you, Baxter?”
I flex my arm, feeling the strain on my new muscles from a week of baling hay. It hurts like the devil. I’d like to say that I play hockey, but I’m enough of a fake as it is. “I don’t know how to skate.”
Hunter smirks at this. “Everyone knows how to skate.”
I shrug like it’s no big deal but what I’d really like to do is wipe that smirk off his face.
Hunter winks at Halle. “So, we have an exhibition game in a couple of weeks. You gonna support the home team?”
Halle tips her head. “Oh, I’m sure you have all the support you need. You know? Like Jenna?”
Hunter flinches at Jenna’s name. “Jenna’s okay, but she’s kind of an airhead. I’d really like it if you came. For old time’s sake?”
Halle twists her hand around mine. “We’ll try to make it if we’re not tied to a tree somewhere.”
“Yeah. Well, see you at lunch tomorrow, Halle. And if you need a ride to school, gimme a call.” Then he winks at me.
“Jerk,” Halle says when he leaves. She squeezes my hand before she lets go. “I didn’t do that to make him jealous or anything. I just don’t want him to think he’s got a second chance with me. He didn’t know that Jenna’s so possessive. Poor Hunter. He’s going to have a hard time getting rid of her.”
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